And another…
Would Hamid Hayat have been convicted of providing material support to terrorists if his name had been Albert Smith and his race been Caucasian?
No. Not a chance.
An FBI fink claimed that Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant had been in Lodi, California. The FBI found that that was not true, but there were other Arabic-looking people in Lodi. Hamid Hayat and his father barely spoke English and were not provided with lawyers when they were interviewed after the FBI fink, Naseem Khan, pointed them out. Look– those guys look Arabic. The FBI provided the leading questions; nature provided the appropriate racial characteristics. An American jury decided that the FBI would not be prosecuting these men for no reason and convicted the son, largely on the basis of an alleged confession that he had traveled to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp.
Amazingly, the government seems to have no obligation to prove anything anymore. It did not offer any proof that Hamid Hayat had ever been to a training camp in Pakistan.
The government did not provide any proof that Hayat had actually taken a single action that would indicate preparation or planning of a terrorist act. It doesn’t matter. He’s Arabic.
Case closed.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Where is the so-called liberal media on this? You would think this story would be on the covers of all the so-called liberal magazines and newspapers.
Are you people nuts? Read this, from the New York Times, April 26, 2006:
Mr. Siraj talked about the economic damage that would be caused by stranding Staten Island without the bridges, and seemed pleased that he had recruited Mr. Elshafay, who he indicated was the actual author of the alleged plan.
Sound sinister? You bet. Consider this though– Mr. Elshafay is an informant for the New York City Police “intelligence” department, who received over $100,000 for hanging around some bookstores looking for “extremists”. He befriended the pathetic Mr. Siraj and secretly recorded conversations with him.
Mr. Siraj hates America– no doubt about it– but it was Mr. Eshafay who brought up all kinds of exciting ides about building nuclear bombs or blowing up various bridges in New York.
Now, you’re a young, gullible, foreign-born Moslem. Some lunatic befriends you and you end up driving around town in his car. He starts talking about how evil America is and how great it would be to blow up some bridges. I don’t know what you say exactly, but I know that if I was on a jury, I would think long and hard before coming to the conclusion that you were, by yourself, a threat to America.
Mr. Siraj did not actually take any steps– none at all– towards realizing his brilliant plan. Not a single step. Not one.
Mr. Elshafay is the actual author of the plan. So the U.S. government has “informants” going around, hanging around with impressionable and misguided young Arabs, and saying, “hey, wanna blow up the Brooklyn Bridge? Whaddya think– I could get a bomb. Do you hate America or what,
huh?” And when these pathetic and gullible young hostile Arabs say, “yeah, wouldn’t that be something. I hate America” we arrest them and lock them up for terrorism. What kind of whacked out country is this? This is George Bush’s America.
The bottom line is that there is not the slightest shred of evidence that Mr. Siraj, on his own, was up to anything other than minding his mosque and tending a bookstore.
Did he hate America? Yes. So let’s drop the pretense of looking for actual terrorists and just arrest everybody who hates America. We are building a very large pool of candidates…
NY Times on Hamid Hayat Case
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